Outdoors: Writer’s article intensifies conversation on feral cats

Shockingly, National Audubon Magazine suspended Grafton’s Ted Williams, arguably our country’s greatest conservation writer and environmental conscience. A feral cat lobby’s viral reaction to a column he wrote for another journal led Audubon leadership to discipline him with knee-jerk alacrity. A subsequent viral response from wildlife lovers supporting him followed, maybe helping minimize the suspension.

I contacted Williams about his ordeal. To his credit, he would not criticize Audubon, to whom he has passionately given 33 years of his life and remains staunchly loyal. Williams told me that Audubon must be kept alive, strong and prosperous to accomplish its worthy goals of fighting for land and wildlife, with or without him. He’s neither contacting media nor granting interviews. But much can be said about him without his input.

For decades, Williams has fought against even Goliath enemies of the environment. I’ve seen him put himself at personal risk, going after deep-pocketed business interests that were hurting America’s wildlife. When it comes to fighting for nature, America has no one with a braver heart. But a story he wrote on feral cats elicited claws of email outrage from feral cat fanciers, leading to his next Audubon Magazine columns, Incite and Earth Almanac, to be struck from the upcoming May issue.

Confronted with a flood of coordinated complaints about Williams’ article, National Audubon reflexively divorced itself from its award-winning writer and editor-at-large, going so far as to remove him from the masthead. It further minimized his past connection, writing in a canned response to me that, “Mr. Williams is not an Audubon employee. He is a freelance writer and a conservationist who has written for Audubon for 33 years. He writes for numerous publications.”

When he strengthened Audubon, it embraced him, placing him like a trophy on its masthead. When the radical feral cat lobby expressed concentrated outrage, demanding his firing, Audubon leadership imposed an indefinite suspension and left him hanging.

Audubon subsequently heard loud and clear from many of us who fight for wildlife that Williams was greatly wronged and limited his suspension to one issue. Audubon’s leadership wavers with the wind, hardly showing the fortitude we have come to expect from their fighting-for-wildlife tradition.

Williams temporarily lost his position trying to confront the country’s second-greatest wildlife problem, one that so many wildlife and veterinary leaders avoid addressing effectively for political reasons — the feral house cat that is allowed to prowl and kill in the wild as an unnatural predator.

House cats kept indoors and properly cared for are no problem and certainly, without harm, bring great joy to millions. But the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service have found cats allowed to venture afield to be the greatest single cause of bird and mammal deaths in America. Pet owners who let their cats out in the wild are causing wildlife losses far more staggering than we ever imagined.

In America alone, outdoor cats are annually killing an estimated 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals. While spaying and neutering can help numbers of outdoor cats from increasing, the veterinary practices don’t end the carnage if those cats are subsequently released back into the wild. Veterinarians who perform those services and release those cats are compromising their values, negating the good they do by contributing to the perpetuation of wildlife carnage. It’s easier to feel good avoiding cat euthanasia because we don’t readily see the killings these cats subsequently perform under cover.

Letting cats roam wild outside and especially maintaining feral cats in the wild is not an act of kindness, but rather a dereliction of responsibility — and now, with our current understanding of the vast scope of the problem, a practice warranting outrage.

Williams was benched for one issue for writing an article for the Orlando Sentinel addressing the need to eliminate feral cats. In it, he attacks the practice of TNR (trap, neuter and release back into the wild) carried out by cat groups and sympathetic veterinarians. Williams contends the practice doesn’t reduce the number of cats in the wild, but rather is a re-abandonment of them. When sympathizers continue to feed them, they attract even more feral cats from the area, essentially creating wild cat herds.

Releasing these cats, Williams points out, is dangerous because they are reservoirs for disease. As many as 80 percent of them carry toxoplasmosis. They furthermore are the second-biggest rabies carrier.

Williams additionally advises that their release into the wild is also cruel, and not just for wildlife victims. Released cats will need to survive without proper veterinary care. They will suffer injuries and disease.

Everything Williams says comes from the heart to protect wildlife, which suffers without an adequate voice to defend them. What got him into trouble was his specific reference to two means of effectively eliminating feral cats from the wild, especially the use of an over-the-counter-drug that can be a completely selective feral cat poison.

I subsequently questioned Audubon’s editors about their decision to suspend Williams, sharing that if leadership had the best interests of America’s wildlife at heart, it would have done far better to seize the moment and use the controversy to help teach the ill-informed rather than punish one of our country’s most valiant wildlife defenders.

Williams has been reinstated, and we can again look forward to his next column in July. But his ordeal means nothing if it doesn’t move us to address effectively the carnage of feral cats, diminishing the needless slaughter of America’s native wildlife.

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